1,241 entries categorized "Afghanistan / Pakistan"

May 18, 2016

Reuters reports Afghanistan signed a draft agreement with the Hezb-e-Islami militant group on Wednesday in a move the government hopes could lead to a full peace accord with one of the most notorious warlords in the insurgency. Hezb-e-Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is a veteran of decades of Afghan war and rights groups have accused his group of widespread abuses, particularly during the civil war of the early 1990s, when he briefly served as prime minister.The United States has also linked the group to al Qaeda and the Taliban and put Hekmatyar on its designated terrorist list.

May 09, 2016

The Washington Post reports the Army Special Forces unit that fought its way into the Afghan city of Kunduz after it was seized by the Taliban in October initially did so without proper maps, according to recently declassified documents. The documents, released last month, were part of a heavily redacted report on the Oct. 3, 2015, bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital that killed between 30 and 42 civilians. The investigation, aside from piecing together why an American AC-130U gunship targeted and destroyed a medical facility, revealed a host of issues that beset a small team of Army Special Forces soldiers and their Afghan counterparts as they pushed into a city held by a large Taliban force

May 04, 2016

The New York Times reports as the opium harvest winds down across Helmand Province, Afghanistan’s largest in territory and poppy cultivation, farmers and officials are reporting high yields. The skies were generous with heavy rainfall, and the Afghan government with its cancellation of annual eradication campaigns. It had lost much of the territory in Helmand to the Taliban anyway. So it was with peace of mind that farmers, and thousands of seasonal laborers who had traveled to Helmand, scraped the gum from the opium bulbs. Taliban fighters were just around the corner to lend a hand — and to receive their share of wages and taxes, in cash or kind. The crowded fields amounted to an insurgent recruiter’s dream.

May 02, 2016

The New York Times reports the Afghan security forces began a push to break the Taliban’s hold on a crucial southern highway through Uruzgan Province, officials said on Monday, hoping to ease the insurgents’ intensifying siege of an important provincial capital. While the most public and urgent security concerns in the south have been focused on the fighting in Helmand Province in recent months, the insurgency has also been slowly choking the city of Tirin Kot, the provincial capital of Uruzgan. The province next door, where many of Taliban’s founding leaders hail from, became a softer target for the insurgency last year

April 26, 2016

The New York Times reports as first vice president of Afghanistan, Abdul Rashid Dostum is the second-ranking official in a country that is almost wholly dependent on American military and financial might, and he is eager to visit Washington and discuss how best to overcome the Taliban. The only problem is that Dostum, who has been accused of war crimes, is not welcome in the United States. Dostum’s ascent to the vice presidency of Afghanistan, despite his past, exemplifies a central American failure in a war it is now fighting for the 15th year. In its effort to defeat the Taliban, the United States has built and paid for a government that is filled with the kinds of warlords and power brokers whose predatory ways helped give rise to the insurgent movement in the 1990s, and who American officials say pose as much of a threat to the stability of Afghanistan as the insurgents themselves.

April 25, 2016

The New York Times reports after courting Pakistan for more than a year, President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan changed course on Monday and warned that he would lodge a complaint with the United Nations Security Council if Pakistan refuses to take military action against Taliban leaders operating from its soil to wage an increasingly deadly insurgency across Afghanistan. Ghani has taken pains to persuade Pakistan’s leadership, particularly its powerful military, to bring the insurgent leaders to the negotiating table. But an increase in Taliban violence, including a brutal attack last week in the heart of the Afghan capital, Kabul, that left at least 64 people killed and more than 300 wounded, has forced Ghani to effectively end what has been a cornerstone effort of his troubled presidency.

April 11, 2016

BBC News reports at least 12 people have been killed and dozens wounded by a bomb targeting police recruits in eastern Afghanistan, officials say. The blast happened in the Sorkhrot district of Nangarhar province. The recruits were travelling to the capital Kabul when the bus was hit by a remote-control device in a motorbike, a local official told the BBC. Other reports suggested a suicide bomber had rammed the bus on the motorbike. A Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said the Islamist group had carried out the attack, according to the Reuters news agency.

April 07, 2016

The New York Times reports American airstrikes in the southeastern Afghan province of Paktika killed at least 17 civilians, local officials and elders said on Thursday, differing from official American and Afghan claims that only militants had been killed. Hajji Muhammad Hasan, a former senator from the Gomal District, said that three drone strikes hit the area of Nematabad on Wednesday. He said that the first strike hit a pickup truck carrying Hajji Rozuddin, a local elder on his way to mediate a land dispute in the Kakarzai tribe. Also in the truck were four of Mr. Rozuddin’s bodyguards and seven other people.

March 29, 2016

The Washington Post reports an F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jet crashed Tuesday night in Afghanistan shortly after taking off north of Kabul at Bagram Airfield, but the pilot ejected and has been safely recovered, military officials said. The incident occurred about 8:30 p.m. in Afghanistan, said Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook. Coalition troops responded and retrieved the pilot and were securing the crash site north of the airfield, said Capt. Bryan Bouchard, an Air Force spokesman on the base. The pilot was under evaluation Tuesday evening at Craig Joint Theater Hospital on the base. It is not believed that the plane was hit with any kind of enemy fire, Bouchard said.

March 28, 2016

Al Jazeera reports at least 70 people - mostly women and children - have been killed at a crowded park in Pakistan in a suicide blast that also wounded more than 300 people, officials said. A faction of the Pakistani Taliban, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, later claimed responsibility for the attack in the eastern city of Lahore and said that it was aimed at Christians. Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder, reporting from the capital, Islamabad, said Christians were celebrating Easter Sunday at Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park, which is popular with families, when the bomber blew himself up a few metres from a children's play area.

March 22, 2016

The New York Times reports the new commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan apologized on Tuesday to the victims of the United States’ bombing of a hospital in the northern city of Kunduz last year that killed 42 people. The commander, Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., accompanied by his wife, Norine, and the Afghan ministers of defense and the interior, traveled to Kunduz to meet with local officials and the families of victims of the attack on the Doctors Without Borders hospital on Oct. 3. His apology, which went beyond what his predecessor who oversaw the attack had said, came days after a dozen military personnel were disciplined by the Pentagon.

March 18, 2016

Reuters reports the U.S. military has disciplined more than a dozen personnel, including officers, following a deadly October air strike in Afghanistan that destroyed a hospital run by Medecins Sans Frontiers and killed at least 42 people, U.S. officials told Reuters on Friday. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the U.S. military took administrative and non-judicial actions against the U.S. personnel, instead of seeking criminal charges. In November, the U.S. military described the strike, which killed at least 42 medical staff, patients, and caretakers, as a tragic, avoidable accident caused primarily by human error.

March 17, 2016

Reuters reports a small but significant militant faction on Thursday joined Afghanistan's fledgling peace process, a rare positive for an initiative that has been fraught with false starts and publicly rejected by the main Taliban insurgency. The announcement marked the first success for the renewed effort, aided by the U.S., China and Pakistan, to end nearly 15 years of war in Afghanistan that kills and maims hundreds of people each month. Representatives of Hizb-i-Islami, an Islamist militant movement of several hundred fighters led by Soviet-era Afghan war hero Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, appeared at a press briefing with members of the High Peace Council, which oversees the peace process. "Today we held our first intra-Afghan dialogue in the presence of High Peace Council leadership," said Mohammad Ayoub Rafiq, the council's head of secretariat.

February 24, 2016

Reuters reports Afghan officials took delivery of 10,000 automatic rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition as a gift from Russia on Wednesday, another sign of deepening involvement by Moscow in the war-torn country. Dependent almost entirely on foreign aid, Afghan security forces are struggling to secure the country amid a rising insurgency. As the NATO-led coalition's military presence dwindled last year, Afghan leaders reached out to Moscow, which fought a war of its own in Afghanistan during the 1980s, for more Russian-made weapons, including small arms, artillery and attack helicopters.

The New York Times reports United States airstrikes have helped to break a bloody impasse between Afghan troops and Taliban militants north of Kabul, allowing repair crews to reach downed power lines and restore electricity to the capital after more than three weeks of disruption, an Afghan official said on Tuesday. The transmission lines connecting Kabul to hydroelectric generators in Uzbekistan were first cut on Jan. 27, depriving the capital of its most important supply of electricity. The government accused the Taliban of destroying pylons that support the cables, though the militants denied doing so.

February 22, 2016

Al Jazeera reports a suicide bomber targeting a police commander has killed at least 13 people, including nine civilians, in Afghanistan's northern Parwan province, an official said. The attack on Monday happened near a clinic and a bazaar in an area 60 kilometers northwest of Kabul, said Zaman Mamozai, the provincial police chief. Four local police were among those killed, and another 19 people, including 17 civilians, were wounded, he said. The police commander who was targeted in the attack was among those wounded. "Once again, a Taliban suicide bomber attacked innocent civilians," Mamozai said, adding that the bazaar was packed with shoppers and that people were waiting outside the clinic for treatment.

The Washington Post reports in an apparent bid to bolster security in other parts of Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan, the Afghan Army abandoned a number of its bases in two hard fought districts over the weekend, according to a report from the Afghan news outlet TOLO News. The three bases were located in the districts of Musa Qala and Now Zad, two areas that form a northern portion of Helmand Province. According to TOLO News and expounded on in a post in the Long War Journal, the bases were manned by roughly 400 troops and destroyed prior to their departure. Last summer, the Taliban gained a significant amount of territory in both Musa Qala and Now Zad and the Afghan Army’s withdrawal appears to signify the complete capitulation of the two districts to the militants.

February 17, 2016

The New York Times reports child soldiers recruited by the Taliban were used in the battle to overrun the northern city of Kunduz last year, a prominent human rights organization said on Wednesday. Human Rights Watch reported 13 cases of children recruited to fight for the Taliban in that battle. Its researchers found that the insurgents used Islamic religious schools in the area “to provide military training to children between the ages of 13 and 17, many of whom have been deployed in combat.” Human Rights Watch said the Taliban begin indoctrinating children from as early as 6 years old. The United Nations has documented that children as young as 10 participated in the fighting in Kunduz, the capital of Kunduz Province.

The Washington Post reports the Afghan air force is poised to take a major step forward in 2016 with the initial deployment of the A-29 Super Tucano, an attack plane bought by the Pentagon to give the Afghan military the ability to drop bombs in combat. But before the plane has flown a single combat mission, a new report suggests the Afghan military is struggling to avoid killing civilians with the other aircraft it already has. The number of civilians killed by the Afghan air force increased almost eight times between the first half of 2015 and the second, according to a new report on protecting civilians in armed conflict by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan. The organization recorded five civilians killed and 23 injured by the Afghan air force between January and and June 2015, and 41 killed and 57 injured in the latter half of the year.

February 09, 2016

The New York Times reports the United States Army will deploy hundreds of soldiers to the southern Afghan province of Helmand, where government forces have been pushed to the brink by Taliban militants, a military spokesman said Tuesday. It will be the largest deployment of American troops outside major bases in Afghanistan since the end of the NATO combat mission in 2014. Though the military insists that the soldiers will not take active combat roles, American Special Operations forces have increasingly been drawn into the fighting in Helmand as one important district after another has fallen or been threatened by Taliban insurgents.

February 02, 2016

BBC News reports US air strikes in eastern Afghanistan have destroyed a radio station used by the Islamic State militant group, US and Afghan officials say. The drone attacks in Nangarhar's remote Achin district hit the "Voice of the Caliphate" station operated by IS, officials said. IS expanded into Afghanistan last year, and began an FM radio station in an effort to attract new recruits. They have clashed with Afghan forces, as well as rival Taliban militants. IS members have also killed numerous local people, who tell stories of horrific violence.

February 01, 2016

The New York Times reports the United States has carried out at least a dozen operations — including commando raids and airstrikes — in the past three weeks against militants in Afghanistan aligned with the Islamic State, expanding the Obama administration’s military campaign against the terrorist group beyond Iraq and Syria. The operations followed President Obama’s decision last month to broaden the authority of American commanders to attack the Islamic State’s new branch in Afghanistan. The administration — which has been accused by Republicans of not having a strategy to defeat the group — is revamping plans for how it fights the terrorist organization in regions where it has developed affiliates.

January 28, 2016

The Washington Post reports the U.S. general nominated to take over as the new top commander of the U.S. war in Afghanistan said on Thursday that security there has deteriorated, and promised a detailed assessment of how many American troops will be needed within 90 days of taking the job. Army Lt. Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., who has been nominated to take over the war and pin on a fourth star, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he will “re-look at” what U.S. military presence is needed if he is confirmed for the job. That leaves the window open to keeping both more military advisers and Special Operations troops in Afghanistan as part of a generational approach in which Americans troops remain for years to come.

January 27, 2016

The Associated Press reports amid growing concern about setbacks in Afghanistan, the Obama administration has chosen Lt. Gen. John W. "Mick" Nicholson, Jr., a veteran of multiple Afghan war deployments, as the next top American commander in Kabul, officials said Wednesday. If his selection is confirmed by the Senate, Nicholson would succeed Gen. John F. Campbell, who is expected to retire. In announcing the Nicholson nomination, Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook quoted Defense Secretary Ash Carter as expressing gratitude for Campbell's contributions, saying he has helped put Afghanistan on a "better path."

January 26, 2016

The Washington Post reports top U.S. military commanders, who only a few months ago were planning to pull the last American troops out of Afghanistan by year’s end, are now quietly talking about an American commitment that could keep thousands of troops in the country for decades. The shift in mindset, made possible by President Obama’s decision last fall to cancel withdrawal plans, reflects the Afghan government’s vulnerability to continued militant assault and concern that terror groups like al-Qaeda continue to build training camps whose effect could be felt far beyond the region, said senior military officials.

January 21, 2016

The Washington Post reports the Obama administration has granted the military new authorities to strike the Islamic State in Afghanistan, signaling a more sustained fight against the extremist group outside of its base in Iraq and Syria, officials said on Wednesday. A defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal decisions, said new rules of engagement approved last week permitted commanders in Afghanistan to launch air strikes against Islamic State militants because of their affiliation with the group, in the same way it targets fighters linked to al-Qaeda. The new arrangement “enables the United States to more actively target ISIL in Afghanistan,” the official said, using an acronym for the group that controls much of Iraq and Syria and has established outposts from North Africa to central Asia.

The Associated Press reports the Afghan reporters recognized the voice threatening them with death on the Islamic State group's local radio station. It was a former colleague, who knows their names and where they work. The threats were made during a discussion program on "Voice of the Caliphate," an elusive radio station operated by one of the extremist group's newest affiliates. The so-called Khorasan Province has battled Afghan forces and the Taliban alike, carving out an enclave in Nangarhar, a rugged eastern province bordering Pakistan. It has adopted the media strategy of its mother organization in Syria and Iraq, including the production of grisly, professionally made videos showing battles and the killing of captives. But in impoverished Afghanistan, where few have access to the Internet, radio could prove more effective at recruiting fighters and silencing critics.

January 07, 2016

The Washington Post reports a Republican congressman who previously served as a Navy SEAL commander said Thursday that bureaucratic red tape might have delayed a rescue force and prevented close air support from adequately helping an Army Special Forces team during a firefight in southern Afghanistan this week in which one American was killed. Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.), questioned if the rules of engagement in Afghanistan played a role in limiting the support troops on the ground received. They remain “so restrictive that when a unit is pinned down available assets are not given the latitude to respond in a timely manner and it appears in this case that it cost lives,” Zinke said in an interview.

January 06, 2016

Reuters reports U.S aircraft carried out a dozen strikes in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday as fierce battles continued with Taliban insurgents around the town of Marjah near the provincial capital, a U.S. army spokesman said. The strikes came a day after one U.S. service member was killed and two other Americans and a number of Afghan special forces soldiers were wounded during operations in the province, which has seen months of heavy fighting. U.S. army spokesman Col. Michael Lawhorn said U.S. special forces were still in place on Wednesday, supporting Afghan army units in Marjah and Sangin district, further to the north, and air support had also been provided.

January 05, 2016

The Associated Press reports one U.S. service member was killed and two were wounded in fighting Tuesday in southern Afghanistan, the U.S. military command in Kabul said. The fighting, which reflects intensified efforts by the U.S. and its Afghan partners to push back against recent Taliban gains, was near the city of Marja, Helmand province, which shares a border with Pakistan. The Taliban in recent weeks have focused their efforts on retaking parts of Helmand, and the U.S. has countered with U.S. special operations forces working with Afghan troops. In a brief written statement announcing the three U.S. casualties, the U.S. military command in Kabul said one died of wounds sustained "during operations" in Marja, and that two were wounded.

January 04, 2016

The New York Times reports Afghan special forces fought with insurgents barricaded in a house near the Indian consulate in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif on Monday after an overnight attack that coincided with an assault on an Indian air base near the border with Pakistan. As the battle stretched into the afternoon, soldiers entered the building, a large structure formerly used as an office by U.S. development agency USAID, where between four and six attackers had locked themselves inside a safe room.

December 15, 2015

The Associated Press reports supporters of the Islamic State group in Afghanistan are attempting to establish a regional base in the eastern city of Jalalabad, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General John Campbell, said on Tuesday. In an interview with The Associated Press, Campbell said that "foreign fighters" from Syria and Iraq had joined Afghans who had declared loyalty to the group in the eastern province of Nangarhar, bordering Pakistan. He said there were also "indications" that the IS supporters in Nangarhar were trying to consolidate links with the group's leadership in Syria and Iraq.

December 10, 2015

The New York Times reports Afghanistan’s intelligence chief, a staunch critic of his government’s policies toward neighboring Pakistan, resigned on Thursday, in an apparent protest against President Ashraf Ghani’s trip this week to the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, which has been widely viewed as part of an effort to restart peace talks with the Taliban. Rahmatullah Nabil, a favorite of American officials who has served two stints totaling almost five years at the helm of the National Directorate of Security, criticized Ghani’s trip to Pakistan in a scathing message posted on his Facebook page on Wednesday, the eve of his resignation, just as the president’s plane was landing back in Kabul. Nabil said the president’s trip was disrespectful to Afghans killed in Taliban attacks around the country because Ghani had been holding talks with government leaders in Pakistan, where the Taliban’s leadership council is based.

December 08, 2015

BBC News reports fighting has been reported at the airport in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. It is not clear whether the clashes have resulted in casualties. A spokesman for the provincial governor said the attackers had managed to breach the first gate of the complex. A pro-Taliban website said the group had launched an attack "against domestic and foreign forces". Militant violence has increased across Afghanistan since the departure of most U.S. and NATO forces last year. "Several insurgents" had carried out the attack, the provincial governor's spokesman Samim Khopalwaq told AFP. Local authorities have reportedly deployed commandos to the area.

December 04, 2015

The New York Times reports Taliban officials on Friday strenuously denied claims that their leader, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, had been killed or wounded and promised to soon release an audio recording of him to prove he is still alive. The militants’ chief spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, dismissed reports by government officials and rival groups that Mullah Mansour had been shot in a gunfight that broke out between rival insurgent factions during peace talks this week. But he also tacitly acknowledged the credibility problem faced by the group, which denied for years that its previous leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, had died, then finally admitted it two years after the fact.

AFP reports a 55-year-old former Russian tank commander, dubbed the Russian Taliban, was sentenced to life plus 30 years in a U.S. prison for fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Irek Hamidullin was convicted by a U.S. jury in August on 15 counts relating to a 2009 insurgent attack that he masterminded on an Afghan border police outpost near the Pakistani border. He was found guilty of conspiring to shoot down U.S. helicopters and kill U.S. and Afghan soldiers, and of conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction among other charges.

December 03, 2015

The New York Times reports a series of home raids by C.I.A.-trained Afghan counterterrorism forces in the past month resulted in the deaths of at least six innocent civilians, according to Afghan government officials, reviving an issue that has been a chronic source of tension between Afghanistan and the United States. The deaths happened over the course of three raids in the restive eastern province of Khost, the officials said, including a Nov. 20 episode in which a husband and wife were killed with two American advisers present. The raids were conducted by the Khost Protection Force, one of the regional units known as counterterrorism pursuit teams, set up by the C.I.A. to fight the Taliban, the Haqqani network and Al Qaeda.

December 02, 2015

BBC News reports Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour has been seriously wounded in shooting at a meeting of militants in Pakistan, Taliban sources say. Four Taliban gunmen were killed in the gunfight after an argument on the outskirts of Quetta, a source said. Another report said Mullah Mansour died but this is unconfirmed. A Taliban spokesman denied the gunfight happened. Mullah Mansour's appointment prompted splits in the Taliban after its founder Mullah Omar's death emerged in July.

December 01, 2015

Reuters reports the NATO allies decided on Tuesday to hold alliance troop levels in Afghanistan steady at about 12,000 next year and launched a campaign to fund the 350,000 Afghan forces it hopes can some day secure the country against Taliban militants. Fourteen years after the United States first sent troops to Afghanistan, NATO governments have doubts about the ability of its army and police to defend against Taliban fighters, who briefly took over the northern city of Kunduz in September. As a result, the 28-member Western alliance is abandoning plans to slash its troop levels by the end of this year. Excluding U.S. counter-terrorism forces, NATO will have about 12,000 troops in Afghanistan for most of next year, made up of about 7,000 U.S. forces and 5,000 from the rest of NATO and its partners such as non-NATO member Georgia.

November 24, 2015

The New York Times reports the American airstrike that destroyed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in the Afghan city of Kunduz last month was the result of human errors, failures in procedure and technical malfunctions, according to military officials who have been briefed on the military’s internal investigation. The military officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the report before its official release, said the investigation found that the gunship’s crew had been unable to rely on the aircraft’s instruments to find the target. Instead, they relied on verbal descriptions of the location that were being relayed by troops on the ground, a mix of American and Afghan Special Forces. Based on those descriptions, the gunship’s crew locked onto the hospital compound, mistakenly believing that it was the building that the soldiers on the ground were describing, the two officials said.

November 19, 2015

The Washington Post reports while U.S. officials debate the merit of expanding the war against the Islamic State militant group in Iraq and Syria, Washington keeps three times as many service members in Afghanistan, with an even larger force of contractors and civilian employees assisting. Combat operations in Afghanistan are over, White House and Pentagon officials say, but those deployed still face a variety of attacks in what commanders call “non-combat” operations – even when driving to work at dawn on a base with a 13-mile perimeter.

November 11, 2015

The New York Times reports through a persistent rain in the Afghan capital on Wednesday, thousands of protesters carried the coffins of seven beheaded Hazara hostages to the presidential palace, demanding greater security and an end to a wave of targeted sectarian violence. The protesters — whose numbers are rare in Afghanistan in recent years — shouted slogans including “Death to the Taliban” and “Death to the Islamic State.” They accused President Ashraf Ghani of incompetence in the face of deteriorating security and called for the resignation of his coalition government. President Ghani, who appeared on national television nearly 10 hours after the protesters had marched six miles from the west of Kabul to the gates of his palace, urged calm and unity.

November 10, 2015

The New York Times reports a growing sense that Afghanistan is slipping into greater chaos and will not stabilize anytime soon is driving rising numbers of Afghans to flee for Europe, hopeful that they will enjoy the same welcome given Syrians and Iraqis seeking safety from war and terror. Aided by smugglers, and worried that borders would soon close along the migrant trail through the Balkans, about 64,000 Afghans were registered entering Greece in October, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

November 09, 2015

Reuters reports rival groups of Taliban militants have clashed in the southern Afghan province of Zabul, killing as many as 80 people in recent days, officials said on Monday, as brewing hostility between factions in the insurgency turned violent. Government officials and spokesmen for the two main Taliban groups said fierce fighting had been underway since the weekend, with each side blaming the other for starting the violence. Insurgents who have pledged allegiance to Islamic State may also have been involved.

November 06, 2015

The Washington Post reports as the U.S. military continues to investigate the airstrikes it launched on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan, the Pentagon faces a thorny question: Will it make condolence payments for the Taliban fighters who were killed there while recuperating from battlefield injuries? The hospital was bombed for more than an hour on Oct. 3, with a mixture of medical personnel, Afghan soldiers, civilians and Taliban fighters inside. At least 30 people medical professionals and patients were killed. At the time, the hospital had 105 patients, including 20 members of the Taliban, according to a report released Thursday by Doctors Without Borders.

November 05, 2015

Al Jazeera reports a breakaway faction of the Taliban has elected its own leader, sparking speculation over the unity of the group and its future decisions. Abdul Manan Niazi, the spokesperson for the High Council of Afghanistan Islamic Emirate, told Al Jazeera that Mullah Mohammad Rasool Akhund, a senior Taliban official, has been chosen as the group's new "supreme leader." Niazi also announced Mullah Mansoor Dadullah and Sher Mohammed Mansoor as deputies to Mullah Rasool. "We have elected Rasool as our supreme leader following a long and thoughtful discussion with our elders and mujahideens," Mullah Niazi said.

BBC News reports Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) staff were shot at from the air while fleeing a hospital in northern Afghanistan that was hit by US air strikes a month ago, the charity says. In a report MSF said there were no weapons or fighting inside the compound in Kunduz before the bombing started. The U.S. initially said its forces had come under fire, but later said the air strikes were requested by Afghan forces under Taliban fire. The bombing killed at least 30 people. Some accounts of events mentioned shooting that appeared to "follow the movement of people on the run," the report said. It said the shooting probably came from the plane carrying out the attack.

The Washington Post reports Doctors Without Borders on Thursday released a report on the Oct. 3 bombing of its Kunduz medical facility by the U.S. military. The first bombs from a U.S. AC-130 gunship fell between 2 a.m. and 2:08 a.m., prompting a flurry of calls from the medical organization, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières Global (MSF), for the airstrikes to stop. The report was released by MSF to be transparent and counter speculation that the hospital was being used as a Taliban military base, the medical organization said. The hospital was treating Afghan civilians, Taliban fighters and civilians the night of the airstrikes, it said.

November 04, 2015

The Washington Post reports northern Afghanistan includes nine provinces stretching from Faryab along the Iranian border to the west to the soaring cliffs and gemstone mines in Badakhshan to the east. Long known as one of the country’s safest places, the region has more recently seen the temporary fall of Kunduz, a major strategic city, to the Taliban and other violent groups. “Our enemy is more able than in earlier times and more able to work across district and across boundaries together,” said Brig. Gen. Andreas Hanneman, a German officer who leads coalition operations in the north. “Which means across district, and even across provincial [borders].”

November 02, 2015

The Washington Post reports John Sopko’s team of investigators has uncovered all kinds of wasteful spending in Afghanistan through its work as a U.S. government watchdog. Now the group has uncovered a $43 million gas station, which Sopko calls “gratuitous and extreme”—and possibly criminal. In a scathing report, Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, wrote that a similar compressed natural gas station in Pakistan cost $500,000, or about $306,000 at current exchange rates, meaning the Afghanistan station cost 140 times as much. He wrote that the Pentagon’s program had “several troubling aspects,” including $30 million in overhead costs, and the lack of a feasibility study before the project began.